Getting 404 error pages right in Umbraco

When a browser requests a URL that does not exist, they are supposed to get a “404 Not Found” response. It is a good design practice to have a custom 404 design for your site. There are some good creative examples on the web.

A basic search for configuring 404 error pages in Umbraco returns results that mostly describe how to set the id of the not found node, the node that will be displayed when there are no other nodes that match a requested URL. Essentially, you need to specify the node id in the errors section of /config/umbracosettings.config as follows:

<errors>
  <error404>1826</error404>
</errors>

Since I am running IIS 8, I followed the instructions that to insert the following element before the end of the system.webServer section of web.config:

<httpErrors existingResponse="PassThrough"/>

This sort of works. For .aspx and extensionless URLs I was getting the content of the page I had set in umbracosettings.config. But other URLs, such as .html or .jpg were returning a 404 Not Found response with an empty body.

<httpErrors>
   <remove statusCode="404" subStatusCode="-1" />
   <error statusCode="404" prefixLanguageFilePath="" 
      path="/missing.aspx" responseMode="ExecuteURL" />
</httpErrors>

With this setting, I now get the 404 page content returned regardless of the file extension.